Re: Workshop and meeting requirements

On Tue, 13 May 2014 07:43:43 +0200, Daniel Glazman  
<daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com> wrote:

>> [SZ] Do you have any idea of how long it takes to get a visa to the US  
>> from China? It can take as much as two months.
> Yeah well we experienced the same trouble when we queued for hours
> for a chinese visa for Shenzhen. Some of us had their passport
> retained two months too, creating BIG travel issues.

Right. But given that nearly all W3C events are held in US/Europe-friendly  
visa zones, this is nearly *always* the experience for attendees from  
Russia, China, Africa, India / South Asia, Central and South America…

I don't see this as an argument for anything except maintaining the strong  
preference toward long (even longer) lead times for meetings.

In other words, most of the world's population, and a significant part of  
the population of people working in our area. And a genuine concrete  
reason why there are so few such participants even in areas such as mobile  
payment where we *KNOW* that many of the key people are in those areas.

At Opera, I had employees living in Norway, working on standards, who were  
unable in practice (because of the excessive overhead of getting a visa)  
to attend meetings in the US. Ever.

The relative cost for a small Uzbek or Columbian or Sri Lankan startup to  
attend an event in the US compared with a small US startup to attend an  
event in Uzbekistan or Columbia or Sri Lanka is enormous both in terms of  
administrative overhead and cash. The same for medium-size companies, say  
100-200 employees. And yet we consistently (and incorrectly) assume that  
most development happens in a few rich economies. My experience suggests  
that this is in large part because we almost never see what is happening  
elsewhere.

Any argument that W3C is really a properly global, open organisation is  
nonsense on these grounds. That said, it strikes a far better balance  
between openness, fairness, and being driven by real work and real  
problems than any alternative for standardisation of Web technology that I  
can think of. I work to keep it moving in that direction rather than  
getting worse, because that takes continuous work.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2014 10:18:05 UTC